Stronger, Fitter, Faster

Stronger

Twelve years behind a desk does things to your body. For the first time in ten years I've started hitting a gym 3x a week but that doesn't mean I can muster too many pushups just yet.

Fitter

Lose a serious amount of weight. This is definitely key to making everything else work, so I'll be focusing on dropping pounds to get not only into a healthy range of BMI, but to also increase my endurance and fitness.

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The dangers of being a roadie

When I was younger, the biggest danger of riding a bike was mostly about what I felt like attempting to do ("he's gonna jump it!!!") or if something happened while riding (like a crank arm breaking in the middle of a trick), but as I get older and ride mostly on public roads, the biggest danger is quickly becoming cars and trucks I share the road with.

Of course, it's not all cars and all trucks, it's mostly the one in ten thousand assholes that feel bicycles should not be traveling on roads, should not be in the flow of traffic, and should not cause them to slow down while they pass you. It happens every spring when the normally vacant farm roads I ride on become crowded on the first sunny weekend. You'll get someone yelling as they pass, or purposely making their truck backfire just as they go by. Sometimes, you get something even worse.

Sunday was something worse. A friend and I were at the tail end of a 90 minute easy ride, and we were riding side-by-side on an uncrowded road outside of town. A few people had passed that day, but this time it was out of the blue, and very close. Usually that's just a sign of a driver being inconsiderate and considering this was not only a full sized truck, but a dually my first thought was he was making a simple mistake concerning how wide the back end of his truck was relative to us riding.

The horn blast dispelled any notions it was an oversight or mistake. What seemed inconsiderate just turned into something aggressive and unruly. My first reaction to things like this is to throw up a hand to say "Hey! What the hell, dude?!" and my friend's first reaction was to throw his hand up, and motion it backwards. This set the driver off as we saw him slam on his brakes. Jeez, what the hell is this guy doing. Immediately, the reverse lights came on and a three ton dually truck is barreling towards us on a public road, backwards towards us. What. The. Fuck. Not wanting to get run over, I moved off to the side of the road and my friend did the same, riding right up to the side of the truck.

What follows was a flurry of swearing from the driver: "Motherfuckers... get out of my way.... motherfucking... didn't you see me coming... motherfucking faggots!" while my friend is yelling "Do you know what the law is? Do you know what the law is?" and after a few seconds I get my wits and start taking my phone out to shoot a picture of his license plate but after the "faggots!" hangs in the air, he slams the truck into drive and storms off.

When I got home 15 minutes later I threw on some sweats and drove around town to see if I could spot the truck and get the plate number, but after hitting the local hardware, farm, and grocery stores, I came up empty.

It sucks that this is supposed to become normal, and has become somewhat normal, happening once or twice a year both when I ride alone and in groups. Given that I'm riding thousands of miles on bike lane-free farm roads, there's no way to know when the next jerk is going to brush too close next to me, blaring the horn and who knows what this guy will do the next time he encounters some cyclists. It sucks that this happens to everyone, all the way up to Lance Armstrong (who has been hit by drivers at least a couple times).

My wife has always bugged me to get an ID bracelet for these kinds of worst-case scenarios. I find the idea kind of macabre, basically making my own toe tag for when I die, but I'll probably end up getting one soon.

Posted on February 9, 2009 in stories

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